


Carried Like a Radio

by ConstanceComment



Category: Battle Royale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Curtain Fic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:47:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They escaped the island, they escaped the Empire, and now on the other side of the world they are left with each other, and what lies between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four Thousand Holes

**Author's Note:**

> Finishing this book made me hurt inside, so I'm self-medicating with threesome curtain fluff in a nebulous AU where Shogo didn't hide his injury and none of them are underage anymore.
> 
> The title is a truncated quote from Jim Morrison which reads: “People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”

Shogo tastes like the ash from his cigarettes. It’s not exactly a pleasant taste, but it’s familiar enough that Noriko doesn’t mind. Wild Seven; Shuya’s nickname and Shogo’s brand. Noriko’s boys. She can stand the taste of cigarettes, for the two of them.

Shogo breathes smoke into Noriko’s face as he pulls out of the kiss, smiling down at her from under hooded eyes.

“Gross,” Noriko says teasingly, wrinkling her nose. Shogo grins at her, his raised eyebrow casting a small shadow along his face.

“You like me anyway,” he tells her.

Noriko knows that he meant it as a joke, but she nods seriously. “Of course,” she agrees, and looks at her suddenly, startled a bit before Noriko leans back in to steal a kiss, tilting her head up to capture his lips. He still tastes like ash, and the smoke-smell of his breath stings against the cuts on Noriko’s perpetually chapped lips.

Noriko has a bad habit of biting at her lips until they crack open, raw like an overripe fruit, tender and bleeding. She does so most when she stressed, and Noriko is stressed often. Nightmares, the sound of soda cans opening, rustling in the trees and bushes outside their house; all of them stress her out, which sends her biting at her lips as she tries not to shake apart.

Shuya likes to buy her chapstick, experimenting with the flavors. He throws them to Shogo in checkout lines when they can brave the supermarket, making a game of it for the sake of their comfort. Shogo laughs every time; _damn, Shuya, kiwi, realy?_ And Shuya will laugh back; _we’ll never know if it’s any good if we never try it out!_ And Shogo will make a joke about the durian chapstick, and Noriko will pay for everything while the two of them try not to roughhouse in the checkout isle, her heart too big for her chest.

Today, Noriko knows that she tastes like tangerines. It’s too close to oranges, tangy and highly chemical, but she doesn’t mind overmuch. The flavor blooms inside her mouth when Shogo leans back into the kiss, biting softly at the cuts on Noriko’s swollen lower lip. Noriko makes a soft sound that Shogo chases when he kisses her, and the chemical taste of fake tangerines mingles with the hint of smoke that follows Shogo’s tongue as it slides easily into Noriko’s open mouth. 

Noriko licks her lips; they’ve cracked open again. Blood wells up beneath her tongue, small points of pain lighting softly where it touches her lip. Noriko can see Shogo following her tongue with his eyes. This time he leans down to meet her again, cigarette dangling from his fingers as he carefully loops an arm around Noriko’s waist, placing his free hand on Noriko’s hip.

This kiss is lazy, traded back and forth the way that Shogo and Shuya trade cigarettes out on the porch when the house gets too stifling but they can’t bring themselves to leave. Noriko and Shogo just stand there like that for a bit, breathing the same stale air into each other’s mouths as the sun sets outside their kitchen window, the lace curtains throwing patterns of shadow along them both. 

Like most of the small touches of their shared life, Shuya bought the curtains. Stiff fabric in a pale yellow cut into lace patterns, Shuya chose them when the first moved in and decided that they needed furniture better than what came with their shack house when they leased it. When Noriko looks up at Shogo, she knows that her face has to be patterned with the outlines from the curtains, the same as Shogo’s face is draped in shadows, backlit by the sun.

When they pull apart this time, they both taste of blood and ash overlaid with tangy-sweet chemical orange.

“You’re too young to be a chainsmoker,” Noriko informs Shogo, her voice light with playful seriousness as she throws her arms up around his neck. It’s easier to make jokes than to say what she’s really thinking, that Shogo looks like a photograph right now, a still life laid out in her kitchen. “You could have set my clothes on fire.”

“You love me anyway,” Shogo says back, and there’s a question in it, Noriko realizes. Shogo says the words with the sort of lilt that comes from letting out the words one had not meant to say, a guarded sort of hope, ready to turn them into a joke if he has to.

Noriko steals the cigarette he holds at the level of his hip from in between his fingers. Takes a drag, blows the smoke back into his face with a smile. “Of course I do,” Noriko agrees softly, grinning. “Even if you did set my clothes on fire.”

Shogo laughs at her, startled. Noriko just grins as Shogo reaches for her, taking a drag as she watches Shogo raise a hand to her jaw.

His fingers on her skin are rough where the trail along Noriko’s jawline; they are calloused with work and the general abrasions of life. Noriko closes her eyes and follows Shogo’s fingers with her mind, leaning into the touch. Shogo’s fingers brush her lips, his thumb pressing at her lower lip, smearing a bit in her bloodstained chapstick.

Noriko opens her mouth at the touch. Shogo steals back the cigarette.

Noriko’s eyes fly open in time to catch Shogo grinning around the cigarette, his smile wide and happy, backlit by the sun.


	2. The Stars Threw Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from Bruce Springsteen's _Spirit in the Night_.

Watching Shogo sleep is a lot like what Shuya imagines watching a tiger sleep would be like. For one thing, he snores, which is close enough to purring to suit the comparison. Wide at the shoulders and taller than Shuya by nearly a full head, Shogo throws off heat like a radiator to the point where the three of them barely ever use covers, preferring to use one sheet to catch the natural warmth that Shogo gives. Shogo is a wall of muscle, lean and coiled beneath skin that is covered in scars. The worst of them is on his neck, red and angry for all that the original wound itself was puckered and small.

Kiriyama’s parting shot ruined a lot of the muscle in Shogo’s shoulder and neck. Even though Noriko dug the bullet out of his shoulder and Shuya had bandaged him with Shogo’s bandana before Shogo could bleed out, the wound had still been impressive. On the run, they hadn’t had access to the kind of medical equipment and expertise that Shuya would have liked to get for Shogo’s shoulder, and they’d had to make do with Shogo’s patchy medical knowledge, using whatever supplies they could find on hand. By the time the three of them had made it to America, Shogo’s shoulder was already scarring over and by that point it was too late to fix the damage.

Shogo still has problems lifting his right arm over his head. It’s made it hard for Shogo to look for jobs; anything involving construction or restocking particularly high shelves has been out of bounds for him. As such, he’s had to find jobs where he can, mostly as part of a delivery service for a company that sells pizza in the city but delivers in the suburbs, even out past the outskirts of the city limits where the three of them live. Shogo’s driving talents are thankfully never questioned, and neither is his age. It’s not hard to lie and say _“twenty”_ when the answer is really closer to sixteen, if only because all of them are older than their age records, and besides, it’s not like there’s anyone around to prove them wrong. Further, the sort of companies that hire illegals of one type aren’t going to care if they’re also hiring illegals in the sense of breaking the laws against child labor.

The three of them are still lacking in American documentation. Fugitives from the Empire, the three of them are in this country as about illegally as it’s possible to be, having been smuggled into the Los Angeles harbor in the middle of the night on a ship packed with fruit. Because of that, it’s hard to get any kind of work protection.

Their lack of English skills isn’t helping much on that front either. Shogo knows a fair amount of English, enough to take directions and pay for things, and Noriko has a small handful of useful phrases down pat, but Shuya himself mostly knows his English from song lyrics. He’s learning quickly though; he’s determined not to be a burden on the others. Shuya’s been practicing his English whenever he can, heading out into the city to just watch and listen, let the sounds of another language wash over him. Shuya is studying English the way that he used to study music, and it’s all the same, isn’t it? The words are close enough to lyrics, and the city has a rhythm that more than counts for music, played in the screeching of cars and a bustling of life that is sometimes too much, but it’s so very, very alive.

They theoretically could file for asylum, but they’re not important, they don’t think. They’re not scientists, not part of the command structure defecting from a place of power. They have nothing to bargain in their favor; all they carried with them from home were their injuries and their status as child killers, murderers of their desperate peers.

Intellectually, Shuya understands that Shogo’s health problems have nothing to do with him. Shogo hid the injury from them until it was almost too late, the medical supplies they had had access to were woefully inadequate, and Shuya himself still has no medical training to speak of. What’s more, Shogo was already suffering from plenty of other wounds when Kiriyama shot him, which complicated matters further in terms of recovery. But the misplaced guilt lingers sometimes, coming at night and in the small hours of the afternoon, catching Shuya right in the chest, squeezing his lungs and making it hard for him to breathe.

They are owed so much more from the world than what they have been given. It’s probably wrong to be so selfish when all three of them are here, together, alive and free. Shuya doesn’t even mind their living conditions; he’d sleep anywhere if he could have Shogo and Noriko with him. But it doesn’t change the fact that they’re sick, all of them, and not just physically. They’re eating themselves from the inside, all of them, the scars the Empire left on them not only of the body.

Noriko can’t stand the smell of kerosene and chews her lips bloody out of nerves. Shogo still lies out of habit, even though he _knows_ that the two of them will take care of him, won’t reject him. Shuya knows that he feels guilty every time he does, catching himself on the lie at the back end, looking hunted when Noriko takes his hand and smiles. Shogo always comes clean immediately, but the habit bothers him anyway, and he smokes close to a pack of Wild Sevens a day to compensate. As for himself, Shuya finds that waking alone is one of the most terrifying experiences of his life. And all of them physically flinch whenever someone opens a can.

Shuya loves waking up with Shogo and Noriko in the mornings, but he’d give anything for the three of them to be healthy. They deserve their happy ever after, they deserve peace that’s real peace, not something that feels too much like _waiting_ to be authentic.

Behind Shuya, Noriko shifts. Their single sheet goes rustling in the darkness, and Shuya hears the way her breathing changes, going tense and thick short before she realizes where she is. He wants to hold her, let her know that she’s safe, but he knows from experience that they all still wake up frightened, and the best way to win a black eye or end up knocked out on the floor is to try and interact with either one of his lovers when they’re still mired in that quiet, fearful place between waking and sleep.

Noriko comes out of her dream slowly. Shuya counts his heartbeats as she moves, silently, testing the space around her for the distant sounds of remembered violence, waiting to find some new betrayal. When her breathing smooths, Shuya reaches a hand out for her carefully, and places it gently on her bare forearm, giving her plenty of room to flinch. Noriko only stiffens, but she relaxes quickly, and doesn’t throw him off, or jerk away, so Shuya is counting that for a victory.

“Hey,” he says quietly, and hears the huskiness in his own voice, rough from sleep and worry.

“Hey yourself,” Noriko replies. Shuya is always taken with her. She is gorgeous, gorgeous, even when Shuya can’t see her properly, the light from the window not nearly enough even in this the darkened heart of the angels’ city. “Why are you awake?” She asks him, and he finds that he can’t reply.

“May I?” He asks instead, and inches closer to her, touching her arm again.

Even in the dark, he can hear her smile.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this chapter comes from the Beatles _A Day in the Life_.


End file.
